tion in relation to an ecclesially located interpretation of Scripture, and (3)
the need to attend more pointedly to the telos of biblical interpretation. 2
I conclude that, these questions notwithstanding, the past two or three
decades of sustained discussion about Pentecostal hermeneutics have help-
fully identifi ed a way forward for an ecclesially located reading of the Bible
as the church’s Scripture.
A N ECCLESIAL HOME FOR SCRIPTURAL INTERPRETATION,
PENTECOSTAL AND OTHERWISE
The idea that any ecclesial tradition might have a signifi cant role to play
in the interpretation of the Bible may seem obvious to our contempo-
raries concerned with the nature and practice of human understanding,
but lately it is an idea in search of a homestead only in contested territory.
Indeed, it runs very much against the grain of critical biblical studies in
the modern era.
Biblical criticism in the modern era can be characterized best with the
term autonomy. That is, before engaging with the biblical materials in a
serious or scholarly way, interpreters must fi rst peel off their allegiances,
whether they be to certain theological formulations or institutions, and
remove themselves from their social locations. John Meier, for example,
begins his massive study of the historical Jesus with this thought experi-
ment: “Suppose that a Catholic, a Protestant, a Jew, and an agnostic—all
honest historians cognizant of 1st-century religious movements—were
locked up in the bowels of the Harvard Divinity School library, put on a
spartan diet, and not allowed to emerge until they had hammered out a
consensus document on who Jesus of Nazareth was and what he intended
in his own time and place.” Meier admits that this attempt at codify-
ing what “all reasonable people” could say about Jesus would have its
drawbacks but nonetheless posits the formulation of such a consensual
statement as his aim. 3 Open the shutters to include not just the historical
Jesus but the historical David, the birth of Israel as a people, the giving
of Torah, and stories of monarchy and exile, and indeed, to include the
whole of the Bible, and we would have the telos of modern biblical schol-
arship: to locate reading the Bible in an academically defi ned public space
sanitized of readerly backgrounds and commitments, everyone approach-
ing the text in the same way and to the same end. Biblical interpreters
should operate autonomously—independent of their faith (or denial of
160 J.B. GREEN